SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 23 — Today, Riverbed Technology, the performance company, introduced two new virtual editions to the Riverbed Cascade product family that enable managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver application-aware network performance management (NPM) as a service to their small-to-medium-sized and enterprise customers. The new Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition plus the existing Cascade Shark Virtual Edition provide a completely virtualized NPM solution portfolio that allows MSPs to deliver continued value in a virtualized world with the next-generation of performance management.

Riverbed also announced today Cascade 10.0, the first and only application-aware NPM solution to address network and application performance issues across the three key pillars of virtualization – virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, and software-defined networks (SDNs). This industry-leading breadth of coverage for virtualized environments ensures that MSPs can provide performance management to their customers, regardless of location -- in remote or non-traditional sites, or the infrastructure they have –physical, partially virtualized, or fully virtualized environments.

"BT has always been at the forefront of delivering application performance management to help organizations succeed in a complex, global environment. By integrating the latest application-aware network monitoring techniques from Riverbed Cascade products into our established BT Connect Acceleration service, we can help customers get the most out of their networks," said Keith Langridge, vice president, Network Services at BT Global Services. "BT's professional services teams can now help customers deal with the challenges of both understanding and accelerating performance in a hybrid cloud environment. By offering this as a service, BT can also reduce time and cost associated with operations and management."

With the new virtual edition Cascade products, MSPs can quickly and easily provision performance management services for customers wherever they are required, even in remote or non-traditional sites. In addition, Cascade products are integrated with the Riverbed Steelhead® product family and provide MSPs that offer wide area network (WAN) optimization as a service with a comprehensive service for ensuring the performance of their customers' applications and networks.

"By leveraging server and network virtualization, cloud hosting and service providers are able to achieve multi-tenant services across a single physical infrastructure, but this creates new challenges for performance monitoring, where it is necessary to keep management data segregated by client and subscriber," said Jim Frey, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "Application-aware network performance management solutions must be adapted for these new virtualized environments by themselves being deployed using a virtualized footprint, which Riverbed has made possible in the latest release of Cascade and virtual edition products. In this way, providers can assure services across the entire infrastructure while also being able to discretely monitor and share performance details on a customer-by-customer basis."

In addition to providing the visibility needed for monitoring and troubleshooting network and application performance, Cascade products provide customers the critical information they need for strategic IT decision making and planning across projects, including data center consolidation, virtualization, and WAN optimization.

The Riverbed portfolio of virtualized NPM solutions includes Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition, Cascade Shark Virtual Edition, and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition. Installed as a virtual machine (VM), Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition is the centralized analysis and reporting console that integrates application and network data from Cascade Shark Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition to provide enterprise-wide, service-level monitoring. Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition collects and aggregates flow data and statistics from network infrastructure and virtual environments for delivery to Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition.

"The new virtual editions of Riverbed Cascade products provide an easy-to-deploy solution for MSPs to quickly provision performance monitoring services for customers wherever they are required, even in remote or non-traditional sites," said Randy Schirman, senior vice president of worldwide channel sales at Riverbed. 

"Riverbed is leading the way in NPM solutions for virtualized and cloud environments, which provides MSPs and their clients with the confidence that they will have the needed visibility to monitor and troubleshoot network and application performance in today's virtualized environments and tomorrow's cloud-based infrastructure."

Availability

The new virtual edition products are expected to be generally available in Q4 2012.

About Riverbed

Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization.

-----

Source: Riverbed